Review: The Grace of Kings

I absolutely wanted to love this, and all reviews and accounts and what was being said about the book ahead of time said I would. Unfortunately, the book is more like A Song of Ice and Fire on easy mode, and, while there's a lot to like about that sort of thing, the cohesive whole for this one isn't quite there. The book itself, the first in the series, follows an uprising against an emperor from a few points of view. These points of view are designed to get the different perspectives of things as they're occurring (and perhaps less about the individual storylines) and thus we get a lot of background and setting from the area. Where this works best is with the emperor and when things finally converge toward the end. The problem is perhaps the level of detail, which feels like detail because that's what epic fantasy entails rather than detail that enhances the plot. Worse is that the prose and presentation works extremely well when it's working, which makes me think more that this was an error in editing, overall, rather than an error in anything else. This just had a ton of missed potential overall, unfortunately. I might have had too high expectations, or maybe it's just something else, but this was basically even between hit and miss for me.